There’s been a lot of talk about Barack Obama’s time as a community organizer and whether it’s a relevant qualification for someone who wants to be leader of the free world. Everyone has heard how Obama turned down a cushy Wall Street job to work as a community organizer in Chicago housing projects. After three years, Obama’s major accomplishments were removing some asbestos from the projects and opening a job office.
That experience has been held up either as an example of Obama’s altruism or as evidence of an inexperienced candidate’s résumé padding. So the jury’s still out on what Barack Obama’s community organizing experience means.
But few if any people have considered that Barack’s time in Chicago’s housing projects is not his only experience as a community organizer. A year after graduating from Columbia University, an idealistic Obama spent a year as an organizer for the New York Public Interest Group (NYPIRG) at the City College of New York in Harlem. According to the New York Times, “The job required winning over students on the political left, who would normally disdain a group inspired by Ralph Nader as insufficiently radical, as well as students on the right and those who were not active at all.” [That is a laughably generous description — Ralph Nader is “insufficiently radical” for The New York Times?]
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As it happens, I am intimately familiar with PIRG organizing, and I know from firsthand experience that — aside from their radical politics — PIRGs are often corrupt, morally bankrupt, lacking in transparency, and frequently decried as such even by their fellow travelers on the Left. That a young Obama would be involved in it suggests that the young Obama was either very naïve or had very radical politics, or both.
First some background: Originally envisioned and founded by Ralph Nader, PIRGs are grassroots lobbying groups for progressive legislation. Originally started in Washington D.C., the groups spread to college campuses and started numerous state chapters around the country in the 1970s.
As it happens, the oldest college PIRG chapter in the country belongs to my alma mater, the University of Oregon. As undergrad involved in campus journalism who served in student government, most of my time outside of class was spent railing against the openly corrupt Oregon Student Public Interest Research Group (OSPIRG). PIRGs claimed to be fighting for legislation to benefit students in their campus community. The reality was a total scam.
Since the early 1970s, OSPIRG would receive funding — hundreds of thousand of dollars’ worth, which made it the best-funded student group on campus — through a student-body vote every two years. That vote would take place during student-government elections, in which only 5 to 10 percent of U of O’s 17,000 students typically vote. So OSPIRG needed only about 800 votes to get a big fat check.
What do they do with the money? Your guess is as good as mine. Unlike every other student group on campus — which have line-item budgets and have to use a purchase order for expenditures in order to account for every dime of funding — OSPIRG gets a straight cash disbursement. That’s it as far as accountability goes. The mandatory student-activity fee at U of O was so bloated that paying for extracurricular student groups amounted to about one-seventh the cost of my in-state tuition at the time. To have so much of that student-fee money being allocated by so few votes and being spent with so little reckoning is a first-rate scandal.
